My private tour guests always comment on San Francisco’s architecture. There is a wide variety to see, but the Victorians are always a favorite. Built mostly between 1870-1900 (give or take a few years), there was a time they were not popular. When people were being lured to the suburbs in the 1950’s, people who stayed in the city wanted contemporary housing, and Victorians fell out of fashion. They were cheap to rent, cheap to buy, and when bought, many single family homes, or structures of 2-3 flats, were torn down to build apartment buildings.
I’m all for density housing. It is necessary for a city to have an abundance of apartments. But did builders have to make many of them so aggressively and deliberately dull? No, they didn’t. But it’s cheaper, easier, and faster to build a boring box, and the city didn’t have building codes to reign in the lack of imagination and effort, and what affect it would inflict on the neighborhood.
I tell my guests that when they see a Victorian, and something next to it very much Not Victorian, that tells the history of the neighborhood, and how and when it changed. In the image below, on the left, it’s not as if there was vacant lot waiting for decades for someone to install this slap-crap of a building. There was a Victorian there, perhaps much like the one on the right, torn down in the 50’s or 60’s
What also annoys me is knowing the builder of this Monument to Dull doesn’t live in anything remotely close to that bland. I’m sure they took the money from building visual insulting housing, and live in something attractive. If I were elected King of San Francisco, I would make it a law that a builder would have to live in, or directly across from, any residential property they are going to subject the public to for 2 years.
For more about unique San Francisco homes, I write about some whimsical and lovely non-Victorians here.
A Victorian and a very Not Victorian